What do you need to do to qualify for a QA/Testing job for video games?

Hi Marc,

A QA/Testing job can be a lot of fun! However, I will caution that most tester positions are for temporary contracts (typically from 3-9 months). Additionally, I will also caution that a job testing video games sounds much more glamorous than it actually is. You would be testing the same unfinished software that is extremely buggy for 8+ hours a day.

These caveats aside, it can be extremely fun if you're passionate about making games. Game testers are an integral part of making games better. You'll also learn a lot about the gaming industry in general to see if you want to continue pursuing a career in that field.

A college degree is not required for a testing job, but it is strongly recommended if you want to pursue this as a career. In my experience, usually the contractors who are the star performers will get hired on full-time in a software tester career path. Game testers also sometimes can be hired on as full-time game producers or designers, although it is not that common.

If you're interested in a career in game testing... play a lot of games! Play them for fun, but also try to dissect why you think games are fun and/or successful. Sign up for courses in game design if your high school or college offer them. If not, there are plenty of books to read on the subject of games. The website Gamasutra is also a great resource.

Good luck!

Hi Marc!

It's so refreshing to see someone who would like to make a career in testing! The games industry is getting harder and harder to get into these days, and as another answer mentioned most QA jobs these days are contracted and include long, hard hours for little money and high expectations.

But please don't let that put you off! Working in QA is a rewarding and invigorating job. I became a tester before the industry was as saturated as it is now, without a degree or any relevant educated background.

Having a degree these days will put you head and shoulders above the rest. Computer science and coding knowledge will also help you become invaluable to a company and increase your chances of securing a permanent role. Starting out you might find yourself in a functionality role, but I would recommend branching out and specialising in a particular part of QA. This might be automation, compliance, or even working up to management and leadership.

Overall the best quality a tester can have is passion for the role.

Good luck in your future endeavours! Maybe our testing paths will cross someday!

Today's Testers need to be a lot more technical than in the past. While one can get by as a "black box" Tester (playing the game as a user), I would caution that there will be less and less of these jobs in the future, replaced by automation and outsourcing.

That being said, you can forge a great career for yourself in QA if you have some key skills:
- Project management - This is the best skill to have if you want to use QA as a stepping stone to Production or Project Management. Regardless, it's a vital skill for QA.
- Leadership - The best QA careers tend to exist at the Lead or Management levels. If you can get some people management skills under your belt, you become much more marketable.
- Technical - This one is key. While being a software engineer may not be necessary, tomorrow's QA specialists will need to be able to write and execute unit tests and test automation. Test-driven development knowledge is also a big plus. Your objective will be to find ways to detect and eliminate defects as early in the development lifecycle as possible.

I spent 10 years in QA and believe it can be a truly rewarding career path!

Hi Mark!
There's been a lot of good information provided in the earlier comments.
In my limited experience (I got my first job in the industry 2 years ago as a tester), getting a job as a QA tester isn't all that hard. Game companies need large amounts of testers all the time. The trick to keep that job, is to prove yourself to be different than the rest of the crowd.
A good team of testers need to have various skills and perspectives. I know excellent testers that studied graphic design, literature or were army veterans. Each of them loved their jobs and brought different skills to the table. That's what made them valuable to the team.

So my recommendation to you is this: get a college degree, learn to think critically, pick up a few skills and then apply to QA jobs. If you give it your best shot, you'll succeed.

Good documentation skills, the ability to follow test plans, and the ability to stay on task are some of the more essential skills for game testing.

Documentation is key, if you find a bug and they only thing you send to the developers is "i hit jump, game crashed" that wont be useful to them. The developers will want as much useful information as possible to b able to identify the root cause of the problem and fix it. Test plans are essential for making sure each and every feature or object in the game works as expected, and these test plans will need to be run many times over the development of a project. Finally one of the hardest things when working in QA can be to stay on task. Think of your favorite game, lets say they took you 20 hours to complete, and it was so much fun you played through it 4 times. Compared to working an 8 hour day, that's only two weeks of a project you'll be on for several months, to a year, or more. And during that time, the game will be unfinished, and highly buggy. It's easy to lose focus and just start going through the motions. It can be a very fun career and can open the door to other opportunities.

Wes has a lot of good points above.

A couple things I would add:
-Zynga especially (probably other companies as well) have started to look for a good technical aptitude in their QA people. Abilities to script and read code come in very useful when automating testing plans and digging in to see what is causing any software glitches you might find. The more info and the more details you can give the other members of your team the better.

-Remember that a love of games is crucial! You'll be neck-deep in them every day, so you need to have a love for them!

Good luck!